Amy: first look at Asif Kapadia's documentary on Amy Winehouse

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/02/amy-asif-kapadia-documentary-amy-winehouse

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Amy, Asif Kapadia’s documentary on fame, mental illness and Amy Winehouse, has its first trailer.

Backed by the vocal track for Winehouse’s hit Back to Black, the clip shows archive footage of the jazz-pop singer that foreshadows her early death. The teenage Winehouse is shown posing for home videos, recording her Grammy award-winning second album and running from a crowd of paparazzi outside her Camden home. “I’m not trying to be a star or anything other than a musician,” she says.

Kapadia’s documentary charts Winehouse’s story from her childhood in Southgate, north London, to her death from alcohol poisoning in 2011. In similar style to Senna, his 2010 film about the Formula One driver, the director avoids showing his interviewees on screen, and instead mixes audio from new interviews with Amy’s parents, childhood friends and her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, with archive footage.

Implicit in the trailer is the film’s sense of Winehouse as a victim of success. The singer – who struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, depression and bulimia – was plagued by the press and shocked by the attention that her bluntly honest songs and remarkable voice attracted.

“I don’t think I’m going to be at all famous,” says a pre-fame Winehouse in the trailer. She became, of course, extraordinarily famous. Her problems became her songs, which became her image, which made her – for better or worse – an icon.